EARTH, CLIMATE, DREAMS AND THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE: The Symposium and the 2019 Book

Earth, Climate, Dreams—the book based on the original video interviews—is now available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindleformats!
Note:These video depth dialogues on which the book is based are now open source. Please feel free to share this page with others or link to it from your site with all appropriate credits and this page link.

ABOUT EARTH, CLIMATE, DREAMS

Over time, humans in western culture have undergone a profound restructuring of the psyche resulting in a traumatic sense of separation.

In modern day, we face a growing set of challenges on ecological and social fronts. Industrial development, technological advancement, consumerism and increasing populations combined with a tendency to value science and rational thought over tending nature are key contributors to the complex situation at hand.

The era of the Anthropocene—a term referring to the significant impact of human activity on the planet— has arrived.

The current crisis requires that we reflect on our situation from a depth psychological perspective, contemplating how we might tap into the underlying archetypal themes at work in the culture and begin to articulate them in ways that inspire and move us to personal and collective action.

The symposium included 12 video depth dialogues with psychologists, educators, and scientists in conversation with symposium creator, Bonnie Bright, Ph.D. It originally aired in 2017 and included six weekly live online video community conversations for participants to further discuss the topics introduced in each of the twelve interviews.

We encourage you to consider utilizing these discussions for curricula in universities, psychology and ecopsychology-based initiatives, Jungian groups, climate-focused endeavors, and study groups of all kinds. Please credit each use with “Used with permission—Earth, Climate, Dreams Symposium: http://depthinsights.com/earth-climate-dreams-symposium” If you do use the discussions for group study purposes, we would love to have your feedback.

–Erel Shalit, Ph.D. Jungian Analyst
“The Human Soul in Transition at the Dawn of a New Era”

EARTH, CLIMATE, DREAMS CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

BONNIE BRIGHT

Bonnie Bright, Ph.D. (Symposium Creator and Host) holds M.A. degrees in Psychology from Sonoma State University and in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA, where she also earned her Ph.D. She is the founder and director of Depth Psychology Alliance, an online community for Jungian and depth psychology. She created and served as executive editor of Depth Insights Journal, from 2011 through 2017, and she regularly produces audio and video interviews on depth psychological topics.

Bonnie is a certified Archetypal Pattern Analyst via the Assisi Institute. She has trained extensively in the Enneagram, a psycho-spiritual personality typology system, and in Dagara-inspired ritual and medicine with West African Elder Malidoma Somé. She has served on the board for AHBI, the Association for Holotropic Breathwork created by Stanislav Grof, M.D., and for AWRT, American Women in Radio and Television. Bonnie has also conducted fieldwork excavating an archeological site of the Classic Maya in Belize, and has worked with indigenous shamans in Africa, South America, and the American Southwest.

Bonnie is working on an upcoming book, Culture Collapse Disorder: Ecocide, Exile, and the End of Home. Look for her blogposts and interviews with authors, scholars and experts in depth and transpersonal psychologies on DepthInsights.com.

JEROME BERNSTEIN

Jerome Bernstein received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., where he was born and lived until he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1992. He began his professional career in D.C. working with several non-profit educational and training organizations for people with mental and physical disabilities before becoming the Deputy Director of Manpower Training programs in the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity.

In 1971, he, along with a business partner, founded a new social science consulting firm, RJ Associates, through which he contracted with the Navajo nation. That same year, Native American tribes were given the right to take over the administration of selected programs from the federal government under the Indian Self-Determination Act. Within weeks, the Chairman of the Navajo Nation invited Jerome to become a consultant to assist with the development of a tribal Division of Education as well as being the Tribe’s registered lobbyist on Capitol Hill. This one-week consulting assignment turned into a six-year professional relationship with the Navajo Tribe. He has maintained a forty-five year relationship with friends and professionals and has been working to bring the wisdom of Navajo and Western healing together in a collaborative clinical model.

Through his contacts with the Navajo Nation, and particularly Carl N. Gorman, the Tribe’s Director of the Office Native Healing Sciences, Jerome was exposed to Navajo religion and healing. This had a profound effect on him, and he began to have healing dreams that involved Navajo and Hopi medicine men. At the time, he explored these dreams in his Jungian analysis. Over time, he realized that these dreams were leading him onto a new path: he was to become a Jungian analyst. In 1980, he graduated from the C. G. Jung Institute in New York, becoming a Jungian analyst.

Jerome has been in private practice since 1974. He was the founding president of the C. G. Jung Analysts Association of the Greater Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area, vice-president of the C. G. Jung Institute of New York, and past-president of the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe. He is currently on the teaching faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe. Jerome is married, and has two grown sons, and four grandchildren.

SUSAN ROWLAND

Susan Rowland, Ph.D., is Chair of MA Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and teaches on the doctoral program in Jung and Archetypal Studies. Author of From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (Palgrave 2001), she now specializes in women’s writing in mysteries in the US as well as in the UK in her book, The Sleuth and the Goddess in Women’s Detective Fiction (2015). She is also author of a number of books on literary theory, gender and Jung including Jung as a Writer (2005); Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002); C. G. Jung in the Humanities (2010) and The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung (2012). Her 2017 book is Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C. G. Jung and James Hillman and her new book is Jungian Literary Criticism: the Essential Guide (2019).

STEPHEN AIZENSTAT

Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., is the Chancellor and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is a professor of depth psychology with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, licensed marriage and family therapist, and a credentialed public schools teacher and counselor. Dr. Aizenstat lectures and consults internationally, particularly with global corporations, and is affiliated with the Earth Charter International project through the United Nations.

Dr. Aizenstat’s book, Dream Tending (2009), describes applications of dreamwork in relation to health and healing, nightmares, the World’s Dream, relationships, and the creative process. Dr. Aizenstat’s methodologies extend traditional dream work to the vision of an animated world, where living images in dream are experienced as embodied and originating in the psyche of Nature as well as that of persons.

His other recent publications include The Pacifica Story: Money as Psychic Libido, Eranos Yearbook 72, 2013—2014;The Dangers and Opportunity of Cyberspace: A New Vision of Global Dreaming, Eranos Yearbook 71, 2012;Fragility of the World’s Dream, Eranos Yearbook 70, 2009—2010—2011; Imagination & Medicine—The Future of Healing in an Age of Neuroscience (co-edited with R. Bosnak, 2009), ‘Dream Tending and Tending the World,’ in Ecotherapy—Healing with Nature in Mind (2009), and ‘Soul-Centered Education: An Interview with Stephen Aizenstat,’ in Reimagining Education—Essays on Reviving the Soul of Learning (with N. Treadway Galindo, 2009). His major work, DreamTending, recently appeared also in Italian by Moretti & Vitali as Vegliare il sogno. Teoria e pratica del Dream Tending (2013).

View the depth discussion with Stephen Aizenstat and Bonnie Bright: “Dreams and the Animated Earth” below.

JEFFREY KIEHL

Jeffrey Kiehl, Ph.D., is a senior Jungian Analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado, the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association of Analytical Psychology. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an adjunct faculty member of Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he teaches a course of Ecopsychology. He is the author of the recent book, Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future, which explores the various intersections between depth psychology and climate change. Jeffrey’s interests include exploring connections between psyche and matter, the role of archetypal processes in cultural transformation, and the use of mandalas as a source of collective healing. He has led workshops on ways of connecting to the sacredness of the everyday world, including at the Einsiedeln Conference on Nature and Soul in June 2017 in Santa Fe, New Mexico and at the Oregon Friends of C.G. Jung Society in Portland, Oregon in 2018.

ROBERT ROMANYSHYN

Robert D. Romanyshyn is an Emeritus Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute, an Affiliate Member of The Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. In 1972 he co-founded an interdisciplinary program in psychology at the University of Dallas, and in 1991 he was invited to create a research approach for the innovative doctoral program in clinical psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. In addition to on line webinars and interviews, he has given key note addresses, lectures and workshops at international conferences, universities and professional societies in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.

His book publications include Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies (2019), Leaning Toward the Poet: Eavesdropping on the Poetry of Everyday Life; The Wounded Researcher, Ways of the Heart: Essays Toward an Imaginal Psychology; The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation; and Technology as Symptom & Dream. He has published poems, numerous articles in psychology, philosophy, education and literary journals, written a one act play about Frankenstein, and created a multi-media DVD entitled Antarctica: Inner journeys in the Outer based on his travels.
Website: RobertRomanyshyn.com.

VERONICA GOODCHILD

Veronica Goodchild, PhD, is Professor Emerita at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she taught Jungian and Imaginal Psychology, Depth Psychology and the Sacred, and Alchemical Research for over 16 years. She has been a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist for over 35 years, and is an elected Affiliate Member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts.. Educated in her native England and at Columbia University, she received her PhD in Clinical Depth Psychology at Pacifica.

Veronica is the author of two books: Eros and Chaos: The Sacred Mysteries and Dark Shadows of Love (2001, 2008), and Songlines of the Soul: Pathways to a New Vision for a New Century (2012), which explores the emergence of the subtle world in our time, from Jung’s hypothesis of synchronicity on an individual level to the appearance of UFOs, Crop Circles, NDEs, and the Mystical Cities of the Soul on a collective level.

In recent years, Veronica has been drawn by her dreams to visit sacred sites, and has made journeys to Egypt, Peru, Sacred Landscapes of the UK, and Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene sanctuaries in France and northern Spain.

Feeling grief over our environmental and spiritual crises, and again led by dreams, she has undertaken two pilgrimage walks on the Camino de Santiago in SW France. These led her to apprentice herself to two separate but related shamanic paths – the Path of Pollen in England, an ancient indigenous European tradition based on the symbolism of the Bee – and the mystical path of the Q’ero Peruvian tradition supported by the Pachakuti Mesa tradition of Don Oscar Miro-Quesada.

These traditions focus particularly on our energetic and imaginal relationship to nature and to the spirit of nature, and extend our path of service from self to the environment in deeply meditative ways. For Veronica, the value of these ancient healing paths offer a natural extension of Jung’s psychology from the individual to our current ecological and spiritual crises.

View the depth discussion with Veronica Goodchild and Bonnie Bright: “Dreams, Synchronicities and Our Relationship to the Earth” below.

MICHAEL CONFORTI

Dr. Michael Conforti is a Jungian analyst and the founder and Director of The Assisi Institute. He has been a faculty member at the C.G. Jung Institute – Boston, the C.G Jung Foundation of New York, and for many years, served as a Senior Associate faculty member in the Doctoral and Master’s Programs in Clinical Psychology at Antioch New England.

A pioneer in the field of matter-psyche studies, Dr. Conforti is actively investigating the workings of archetypal fields and the relationship between Jungian psychology and the New Sciences. He has presented his work to a wide range of national and international audiences, including the C.G. Jung Institute – Zurich and Jungian organizations in Venezuela, Denmark, Italy and Canada.

He is the author of Threshold Experiences: The Archetype of Beginnings (2007) which is now being translated into Russian and Field, Form and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature and Psyche. His articles have appeared in Psychological Perspectives, San Francisco Jung Library Journal, Roundtable Press, World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, and Spring Journal.

Dr. Conforti maintains a private practice in Mystic, CT and consults with individuals and corporations around the world. He provides his insights as a sought-after consultant to businesses, government institutions, and the film industry. He has served as script consultant on the films Pride and Glory and Elvis Anabelle and is currently working on a script for a new TV series. He has also been asked to consult on the application of field theory to the understanding and resolution of international border disputes. He was selected by The Club of Budapest and the University of Potsdam to be part of a 20 member international team of physicists, biologists, and dynamical systems theorists to examine the role and influence of informational fields.

He is a recipient of the Vision Award presented by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Conforti is a Senior Fellow of the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. He is currently working on a new book, Hidden Presence: Archetypes, Spells, Possessions and the Complex.

View the depth discussion with Michael Conforti and Bonnie Bright: “The Role of Primary Narcissism in the Ecological Crisis” below.

EREL SHALIT

Dr. Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Tel Aviv, past President of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology. He was founding Director of the Jungian Analytical Psychotherapy Program at Bar Ilan University, and a past Director of the Shamai Davidson Community Mental Health Clinic, at the Shalvata Psychiatric Centre in Israel.

In April 2015 he chaired the Jung Neumann Conference, in kibbutz Shefayim, Israel, and in June 2016 a symposium at Pacifica, Creative Minds in Dialogue: the Relationship between C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann.

He is the author of several books, among them The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey; Enemy, Cripple & Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path; The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego; The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel, and the novella Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return; and with Nancy Swift Furlotti, he has edited The Dream and its Amplification.

He is the editor of Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif, a previously unpublished book by Erich Neumann, and Turbulent Times, Creative Minds – Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung in Relationship,co-edited with Murray Stein, as well as the author of a forthcoming book on The Human Soul in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era.

View the depth discussion with Erel Shalit and Bonnie Bright: “The Human Soul in Transition at the Dawn of a New Era” (recorded in 2017) below.

SUSANNAH BENSON

Dr. Susannah Benson has a diverse background as academic, researcher, educator, and counsellor. She has qualifications and experience in education, academic research, publishing, social ecology and transpersonal counselling.

Dr. Benson has studied, worked and lived in the United States, Europe and Asia, and holds a doctorate from the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Education & Social Sciences, School of Social Ecology and Lifelong Learning. Dr Benson is a Board member and immediate past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), and is the Founding President of Dream Network Australia, Inc.

NANCY SWIFT FURLOTTI

Nancy Swift Furlotti, Ph.D.

Nancy Swift Furlotti, Ph.D. is a Jungian Analyst in Aspen, CO. She is a past President of the C.G. Jung Institute of LA, founding member and co-president of the Philemon Foundation, and founding member of the Kairos Film Foundation and Mercurius Prize Committee. She is also a Pacifica Graduate Institute board member. Nancy is co-chair of the C. G. Jung Endowment at the Semel Institute at UCLA where the Jungian perspective is looked at in relation to neuroscience. She also serves on the board of FARES, Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies in Guatemala, where she has a longstanding interest in Maya mythology and culture and preserving the last area of rainforest in Central America.

Nancy is President of Recollections, LLC, a company she founded with the late Erel Shalit to facilitate the translation, editing, and publishing of first generation Jungian analysts’ unpublished works. Books published by her company include Erich Neumann’s Jacob and Esau, and his forthcoming, Roots of Jewish Consciousness: Volume 1, Revelation and Apocalypse, and Volume 2, Hasidism. This book will also be published in Hebrew. Nancy lectures in the US and internationally and has written numerous articles on a myriad of subjects, and she co-edited the book, The Dream and its Amplification with Erel Shalit. She recently completed Erel Shalit’s unfinished book, The Human Soul (Lost) in Transition at the Dawn of a New Era. She will also complete his final unfinished book, The Dream, Fate and Destiny, by 2020 before moving on to finish her own book on the Quiche Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh.

View the depth discussion with Nancy Swift Furlotti and Bonnie Bright: “Revisiting the Well at the Dawn of Life—Teachings of the Maya” below.

SALLY GILLESPIE

Sally Gillespie is the author of two books on psychotherapy and dreams as well as a number of book chapters, including two in Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change, edited by Jonathan Marshall. Sally practised as a Jungian psychotherapist in Sydney for over twenty years, and served as the President of the CG Jung Society of Sydney from 2006 to 2010. She is currently writing a book based on her doctoral thesis which explored the psychological experience of sustained climate change engagement. Sally is a member of both Psychology for a Safe Climate and the Climate Wellbeing Network, and works as a casual academic in the Social Ecology department of Western Sydney University.

View the depth discussion with Sally Gillespie and Bonnie Bright: “We Need to Talk about Climate Change, with Depth” below.

JONATHAN PAUL MARSHALL

Dr. Jonathan Paul Marshall is an anthropologist and Senior Research Associate at the University of Technology Sydney, currently researching the politics of coal use and the transition to renewables. Previously he has worked on questions around online social life, and the relationship of alchemy to the history of science. He is the author and editor of a number of books including Jung, Alchemy and History; Depth Psychology Disorder and Climate Change; Environmental Change and the World’s Futures: Ecologies, ontologies and mythologies; Disorder and the Disinformation Society; and Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication, and Control.